A 3D printed Mini Cart adds to the nostalgia.

3D Printed Chrono Trigger Cart

I’m still loving the SNES Mini two weeks after launch. I’ve even been spending time with this device at the expense of Destiny 2.To make it even more addictive, the guys at Hakchi2 have managed to crack the kernel to allow us to load our own ROMs onto the device.

The software is really slick; getting your own games installed is a breeze. I loaded up Chrono Trigger and even 3D printed a dummy cart for some extra authenticity.

The King of Couch Co-Op is Back!

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Cables are cool again.

A quarter of a century after Nintendo first showered gamers in golden 16-bit glory, the SNES has finally found its way back onto living room floors around the world. Faithful in almost every detail, this tiny rebooted console is, to all intents and purposes, the Super Nintendo we all know and love. Continue reading →

A blast from the past – updated for the 21st Century

During a recent visit to my parents’ house, I stumbled across my first ever games console, a DMG from 1991. It had been stuffed in a drawer in my childhood bedroom many years ago and forgotten about. Continue reading →

Can you tell a story in 100 words?

An indie author friend of mine, PT Muscutt, recently turned me onto the flash fiction website www.drablr.com, which tests a writer’s ability to express interesting and meaningful ideas in a confined space: every drabble story must be told inside of 100 words. You need a beginning, a middle and an end; a setting, characters, conflict and resolution.

The concept is easy to learn, but devilish to master. I’ve found it can be great for flashes of inspiration, forcing you to cram a narrative into such a constricted format. I’m constantly impressed by what the contributors to the site can achieve.

Sometime around mid 2012 I started hearing a lot of buzz about a new mod that had appeared for the Arma II engine.

DayZ was a zombie apocalypse mod that allowed players to experience the full horror of a first person survival scenario in a huge open world. Set within an incredibly accurate military simulator and featuring persistent servers, permadeath and a completely open style of play, the stories I was reading on blogs and forums were so compelling that they prompted me to build a budget gaming rig purely to experience this game first hand. Continue reading →

Earlier this year a friend and I decided to rent our own DayZ server. After spending a few uninspiring months in the Standalone title we had come to the conclusion that the Mod still reigned supreme, and so I took out a rolling monthly subscription with an online hosting service.

We installed the latest DayZ Epoch files, gave ourselves admin access, and spent a couple of days tweaking the server to give players what we felt would be the best experience possible. We crafted abandoned bases for visiting clans to inhabit and changed some of the landscape to encourage people to head out into the wilderness. We added new scripts for AI squads of survivors and bandits. Essentially, we wanted to recapture that sense of excitment and uncertainty the mod had given us back in 2012, but give it a fresh new vibe for players to engage with.

I think we succeeded. We were proud of what we had achieved; we’d created our own little post-apocalyptic wasteland and we couldn’t wait to see what visiting players would make of it all. We posted the server ID in a select few places online and waited…